President Nelson Mandela was one of the great men of our time: Editorial

He was imprisoned, branded a communist and blacklisted by allies of the racist regime, including the United States, to our everlasting shame.

Historians caution us against placing too much weight on the role any individual plays in shaping the course of great events. Human destiny, they tell us, is the product of larger forces.

But the death of Nelson Mandela is a reminder that, once in a long while, it is the individual that counts. After standing in resolute defiance of a violent and racist regime in South Africa, he spent nearly three decades in prison and emerged at age 71 without bitterness to lead a national reconciliation few thought possible.

Mandela grew up in a South Africa, where a white minority lived in prosperity, under the rule of law, in a fake democracy that excluded members of every other race. Blacks and those of mixed race were assigned a place to live by the government — typically a crowded urban ghetto or a rural wasteland. They were closed out of most lucrative professions by law and denied the right to vote. Their schools and hospitals were segregated and criminally inferior.

Nelson Mandela on the campaign trail in South Africa in 1994.Anacleto Rapping/Los Angeles Times

As young man, Mandela joined the African National Congress, an inter­racial liberation group that had always practiced peaceful resistance to the regime. That changed after Sharpeville in 1960, when police fired on unarmed demonstrators, killing 69 and wounding more than 300. Most of them were shot in the back as they fled, investigators later found.

Mandela then formed a militant offspring of the ANC known as “Spear of the Nation.” He was later imprisoned, branded a communist and blacklisted by allies of the racist regime, including the United States, to our everlasting shame.

The explicit purpose of Mandela’s group was to conduct sabotage, and its targets typically included fuel depots, train lines and other infrastructure. But people were inevitably killed, and to his critics at the time, this made Mandela a terrorist.

“I do not deny that I planned sabotage,” Mandela testified at his treason trial in 1964. “I did not do this in a spirit of recklessness. I planned it as a result of a calm and sober assessment of the situation, after many years of oppression and tyranny of my people by the whites.

“We believed that as a result of government policy, violence by the African people had become inevitable, and that unless a responsible leadership was given to control the feelings of our people, there would be an outbreak of terrorism which would cause bitterness between the various races of the country. We felt that without sabotage there would be no way open to the African people to succeed in their struggle against the principle of white supremacy.

“All other means of opposing this principle were closed by legislation. We had either to accept inferiority or fight against it by violence. We chose the latter.”

The man was a patriot, not a terrorist or a communist. And he proved that decisively when he was released from prison in 1990, while the bonds of apartheid still held down his people. He made clear immediately that his dream was racial equality, not retribution. Quoting from another section of his 1964 testimony he told the vast crowd:

“I have fought against white domination and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if need be, it is an ideal for which am prepared to die.”

South Africa has its share of problems. The AIDS epidemic was allowed to rage mercilessly while Mandela’s successors denied the science behind its cause. Poverty is widespread, and racial inequality remains vast. Mandela had no magic wand.

But he was a special human being. Even his jailers often spoke with him for hours and went out of their way to buy him coffee and biscuits from the local supermarket. To know him was to respect him.

Given its brutal history, South Africa could have exploded in racial violence as the foundations of apartheid began to crumble. But it is instead a democracy today, for all its flaws, with all races living under a common law.

And while Mandela often spread the credit far and wide, he was the indispensable player. And one of the truly great men of our time.